From the director's statement: The film revolves around the narrative of a mystic entity who is captive for eternity in the midst of nowhere. The monologue of the character narrates a strange story of his past which adds a metaphorical aspect to the film. The film explores the psychoanalytical perspective of the entity and its connection with time. Eventually, the film comes up with some unsorted questions about the philosophical perceptions of life, death, and the afterlife.
“An Epilogue” review is part of the Submit Your Film Initiative
As such the 15-minute short begins with the image of the hand of a man touching a wall, while a voice, his essentially, is narrating his thoughts, and his effort to remember why he is there. Gradually, we watch either the shadow of the man or his body, or his face, moving around this rather dark space, which is only occasionally lighted by green lights, while talking about death. For a small part of the movie, the narrations stops and subtle music is heard, before we watch the man once more from his back.
There are a number of issues with this rather experimental short. For starters, probably in an effort to induce the narrative with a sense of mystery, the whole thing is very dark, to the point that sometimes, it is very difficult to realize what little is going on the screen. Secondly, the narration voice is not appealing at all, and its almost constant presence becomes annoying after a fashion.
Essentially, as the image follows the words, the short unfolds as a poem that is accompanied by images, in an effort to give it a visual hypostasis. However, the number of words spoken make it also very hard to follow the film, particularly for the non-Bengali viewer, since they have to constantly read what is being subtitled on screen. When one adds to that the fact that the images are barely visible and there is very little movement, “Epilogue” ends up being a very hard to watch film. Lastly, the sequence when the narration stops and music is heard, was probably implemented as a kind of relief from the overall motif, but just results in prolonging the film for no apparent reason.
As such, “An Epilogue” ends up being a film that is addressed to very specific audience, essentially Bengali-speaking fans of experimental film and poetry, something very unfortunate, since Sauvik Pandit has given much hope with his previous work, “The Inception of Pursuit”, which had a completely different style though.
